Louise Erdrich - The Master Butcher's Singing Club

Though the sky went dark sooner and the earth was colder every day, the boys went out to the hill and burrowed into it with the eagerness of gophers anxious to hibernate. Slowly, incrementally, they enlarged the inner room so one boy could kneel, then stand inside it. Two could squeeze into it, soon. Then three. And then it rained.

IT WAS A COLD, gray, pounding November rain and it lasted three days, wore the skies out, flooded the ditches and then the town’s sewers, topped the river, filled the sloughs, made running streams of the streets and a great square pool of the unfinished, clay-bottomed basement of the abandoned house where the boys had their fort in the hill behind. Then suddenly as it had poured the sky cleared, the sun blazed weakly and a cool wind dried the surface of the fields from black to gray. After school, the boys met as they’d agreed, and ran out to the hill anxious to see whether their work was damaged, which of course it was, and yet not so badly as they’d feared. A few boards sagged down, the hill itself was eroded where they’d liked to climb for the lookout, but as the tunnel had been dug at a slight upward angle the inside itself, even the secret interior room far inside the hill, was surprisingly, deceptively, dry. For the earth above was saturated with water and many times heavier than when they’d first begun.

Eagerly, the boys began working on repairs.

“Drag the boards over here,” Markus commanded, “we’re gonna reinforce.” He liked the grown-up sound of that last word and said it several times; it was a word that sounded right for the job, a word that smacked of the professional. He’d lifted a crowbar from his father’s tools — no one had noticed yet, and with it the boys pried several more boards from the old shed. Sun fell through the sides of the shack in brilliant slats now. The air smelled clean from the rain, washed, and the boys worked efficiently, knowing that they had only an hour or more of sunlight left in the late fall day. The earth that had fallen in where the boards collapsed was wet and clumped, which should have told them something, for it was much harder to drag the wet stuff out than it had been the dry. But the day itself was so windy, the air sucked moisture into it. They cleared the entry out all the way back to the room, which was only partly supported by a flimsy board framework.

“It’s gonna get dark,” said Roman nervously, as Markus dragged a board in behind him, “I gotta go.”

“Just wait a minute. Help me push this board in.”

Roman pushed the board along the tunnel as far as he could, but only one boy at a time could fit through the narrow aperture. Markus forced his way in through the half-collapsed part of the tunnel, pushed his head through the space, wiggled one shoulder into the opening, and then the other. If his shoulders got through, the rest of him was easy. In the blackness he felt his way forward, reaching back with his feet, gripping the board. He knew that Roman had fallen back now, and he breathed a sudden dampness of air inside the middle of the hill. He shouted for the others to follow along, bring the hoe and the piece of canvas, but he didn’t really care. In his pocket, he had a candle stub, and matches, for he meant to give himself a bit of light to see by in order to place the board he’d dragged along just so. Yet, he didn’t light the candle right away. The blackness seemed friendly, welcoming. The silence soaked up around him, comforting and pure. He felt the walls of the room, reassuringly dry. Deciding that he needed no light to put the board where he wanted it to go, he wedged it by feel up on top of two other boards that he’d stuck upright along the sides of the wall. He’d buried the ends of those boards a foot deep in the ground to stabilize them, and so he was able to fasten the first board up pretty well, and the next, too. He crawled back for one more and took it from Roman’s fingertips halfway down the tunnel.

“I’m going home,” gasped Roman. “It’s almost dark out there. C’mon!”

“Yeah,” Markus said, “soon’s I get this last part reinforced.” There, he’d said it again, and with the board in one hand he now wiggled backward through the damaged part of the passageway into the room. He had just succeeded in forcing that board up into the ceiling as well, when the boys outside the hill witnessed a strange thing. They had all left the entrance and were trudging back to the broken shed to grapple out one more board before they left for home, when something soundless but palpable, some earthen energy, made them turn and look, curious, at the hill. At which point, with a sound like nothing else, a dull interior whomph , the hill relaxed. One moment it was a high domed shape. The next, its top sagged. It took the boys in their astonishment several minutes to remember Markus was still in it.

THE PINE NEEDLE BED was dry on top but still wet underneath, and for a while Mazarine and Franz didn’t do anything at all but talk together, sitting on a low shelf of stone near their tree. Lately, because of his football playing, Franz was getting an increased amount of attention from Betty Zumbrugge, and it upset Mazarine in a way she could hardly admit to herself. Betty drove her father’s car to school, wore a different dress for every day of the week, and silk stockings. Her hair was very blond, maybe too blond said some girls, and she wore a brilliant scarlet lipstick they said she’d bought in Minneapolis. Betty stopped Franz in the hallways and offered him rides after school. She tried anything, to the point of looking foolish, said Mazarine’s friends. So far, Franz had not responded, and Mazarine was too proud to say a word to him about it. For his part, he was unaware that anything that Betty did could possibly bother Mazarine. He looked at her in the dappled piney light.

“Come here,” he said, easing down onto the soft needles.

“They’re damp,” she shook her head.

“We’ll dry off before we get home,” said Franz. “Don’t worry about it.” So she slid down the side of the rock and curled beside him, looking up the spiked tower of the pine, from along the powerful trunk, into the sky. Franz leaned over and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. The line of her hair could have been drawn with a fine pen, it sprang so evenly away around her face. He kissed her eyebrows — brown and straight, very much like his own — and then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her mouth, deeply, his heart pounding thick in his chest. The rain had brought out the scent of pine and the feral earthen odor of mold from the dead leaves. She smelled of harsh school soap, of paper, of the salt of her own body. He leaned back and held her hand carefully, desperately hoping that she’d place his hand on her breast again. This time he would not touch in a rough circle. But she did not.

With an electric movement, swift as an eel, a rustle of purposeful motion that stilled him, she twisted from his arms and knelt beside him. She reached forward and then slowly, with a firm calm, she slid the end of his belt out of the first loop, smiled at him and drew it from the hook, tugging it toward herself. He lay back in a state of wonder. She pushed away the two sides of the belt and rubbed the button on the top of his pants. He bit his lips and his whole brain begged Please. And she undid the button. Then with a mocking motherly care she slid the next button from its buttonhole, and the next, all the way down. She opened his pants and then she lay down next to him. She put her cheek on the thin cotton of his undershorts and he surged up toward her, aching. She put her arms around his hips. He fit alongside the curve of her throat. Reaching down, he held her shoulders, put his hands underneath her hair on the back of her neck, and murmured their private words to her. Her face was hot against him, heavy, her hair seemed molten trailing up his arms. A light wind came into the pines and made a rushing sound.